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Summary

Poetry serves a unique role in our lives, distilling human experience and emotion down to truths as potent as they are brief. There are two times most people turn to it: for love and loss. Although collections of love poetry abound, there are very few anthologies for the grieving. In The Art of Losing, editor Kevin Young has introduced and selected 150 devastatingly beautiful poems that embrace the pain and heartbreak of mourning. Divided into five sections (Reckoning, Remembrance, Rituals, Recovery, and Redemption), with poems by some of our most beloved poets as well as the best of the current generation of poets, The Art of Losing is the ideal a gift for a loved one in a time of need and for use by ministers, rabbis, and palliative care workers who tend to those who are experiencing loss. Among the poets included: Elizabeth Alexander, W.H. Auden, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, Ted Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Marianne Moore, Sharon Olds Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott, and James Wright.

Author Biography

Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Dear Darkness, named one of 2008’s best “Books from Our Pages” by the New Yorker, and For the Confederate Dead, winner of the Quill Award in Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement. His book Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of four other volumes, including Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, and the Library of America’s John Berryman: Selected Poems. The curator of literary collections and Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Young lives in Boston and Atlanta.

Table of Contents

“Young offers an original and personal analysis of the modern elegy, and uses his own experience with the cycle of mourning to structure the book in sections titled ‘Reckoning,’ ‘Regret,’ ‘Remembrance,’ ‘Ritual,’ ‘Recovery,’ and ‘Redemption.’ And the poems are as diverse and universal as the emotions of loss.”—Donna Seaman, Booklist

“[Young’s] latest anthology is his most topical, and, perhaps, his most useful, gathering poems about suffering and overcoming loss … While these poems won’t offer easy answers to grief, they will keep the kind of company that only poetry can, because only poetry can convincingly say, as Ruth Stone does in the last poem of this book, ‘All things come to an end. / No, they go on forever.’”—Publishers Weekly

“‘Grief,’ wrote Denise Levertov, ‘is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.’ Here, Kevin Young has thoughtfully gathered many of these sorrowful perambulations and grievous plummets.”—Billy Collins

“A book for easing the heart in pain. A chorus of poets (the first of its kind) brought together expressly to guide us through dark times when ‘the eye begins to see.’

Kevin Young is the right guy at the right time to do this. Brilliant.”—Mark Matousek, author of When You’re Falling, Dive and Ethical Wisdom